Mother
by sunANDdust
Summary: On that night of her charity ball, old memories come to haunt Talia. Memories of the desert, of hunger and despair, and of her mother.


_Talia_.

Her mother's voice was young, oh so young, and full of childish hope. It arose from the mists of memories to haunt her mind. Words which had been spoken long ago, blurred as if they originated from a past life.

 _If I won't be able to do it, you will do it instead of me. Leaving this place, I mean_.

Did she smile, back then? Did she cry or whimper or look pathetically hopeful?

 _You shall be brave,_ _ _Talia__ _._ An imploring glance. _You shall return._

Return.

The emotions which had shown on her face just a second ago, vanished and were replaced by a blank indifference as she turned her back on the eccentric billionaire she knew as Bruce Wayne, heir of the Wayne family and Wayne Enterprise.

And as Batman.

She walked away, suddenly disgusted by the repugnant opulence and extravagance of her own fundraiser, desiring nothing as much as being alone at the moment.

Of course she nodded at everyone passing her by, smiling, hiding the contempt she felt for every single one of them, before her expression switched back to cold.

Talia knew that Wayne was still standing at the balustrade, hunched like an old man, and stared after her.

Bruce Wayne. It didn't matter which name he used, which of his faces he wore. He was her enemy and could destroy everything.

A slight panic began to coil in her stomach and Talia took a deep breath. Panic is weakness.

Gratefully, she felt the old cold flood her body and mind, and the calm concentration it brought along.

She turned the corner and stopped behind a column where nobody would interrupt her, staring into space for a second. Long ago, she'd promised herself to never be afraid of anything ever again.

To never doubt.

She'd never been an innocent, naïve child. Innocence simply had gone missing the moment she was born in the hell her mother had granted herself to get buried alive.

'But she had no right to bury me along with herself!', Talia thought and dropped the ridiculous Venetian carnival mask to the floor.

In the hall below her feet her guests celebrated in an exuberantly style. The world expected fancy soirées and exquisite merriments when an impeccable invitation to one of Miranda Tates' charity events arrived.

They would flock to her house en masse, just as the Roman people used to crowd the Colosseum, eager for violence and ecstasy.

The modern high society of Gotham would attend her festivities with the same look of greedy lust, the same ill fascination.

Bread and circuses.

This had been her mother's world before she fell from grace. Well, probably not.

The world of a Middle Eastern warlord's daughter might have been just as secluded from the world as the pit. Talia took a peek around the corner and noticed that Wayne was gone. As she searched the crowd below with her eyes, she noticed he was dancing with a young woman, dressed in black.

They seemed acquainted, however, Talia couldn't hide her cynical smile when she recognized with _whom_ billionaire was dancing.

Now Wayne surely believed that Miranda Tate was angry with him for ignoring her. She watched the two individuals talk and told herself it was not yet the time to destroy them both.

Once again, she watched her guests and a cold shiver ran down her spine. Long ago, she had learned to flee the atmosphere covering the crowd like an invisible dome.

Old men flirting with women young enough to be their daughters.

Drunk and sweaty young men, smelling of whiskey and musk.

Wealthy matrons surrounded by young men while their husbands were at home or away for business.

All of them lurched within that ocean of lights, colours and sensuality, swamped by the subliminal tension of lust and carnal desire mixed with the wish for violence and uproar.

Talia's hands began to shake but the very own instinct did not reach her mind.

Lust, desire, physical contact. She couldn't stand the nature of these human features and was something she'd never encounter without a primal sense of fear.

The human weakness for lust had been her mother's death; for the first time it had destroyed her mother's life when she gave herself to the young mercenary who would never be a father for her child. The second and final time when the men of the pit savaged her, leaving Talia behind.

The child which had been damned by a woman who had never known the terrors of the world, a woman who had never before known misery and poverty.

'We abandon other people to our own fate in fear of suffering alone.', Talia told herself and eventually left the overheated hall, entering the lounge through the doors her butlers opened for her. She entered the balcony and stepped into the cool night air, taking deep breaths.

 _You will not die in here, Talia._ , she heard her mother say and remembered how the woman had gestured to the stars above. _One day, you will escape._

There it was, arising in her throat. The bitter feeling she had tried to forget, to gulp down and bury forever.

Shame. Anger. The feeling that somebody betrayed her. Talia's hand tensed around the the balcony's hand rail.

'There would have been no need to escape if you would have loved _me_ enough. Enough to stay alive for the world, not captured under the earth!', she told her mother's voice before noticing she'd spoken out loud.

Frustrating.

Talia stared into the night and listened to the steady noises of nightly Gotham. Somehow, that night made old memories live up again.

Perhaps it was because of her dear friend who had come to her today to inform her of their project's rapid development, his the look of knowing eyes.

He would remind her of that hell forever, however, she never felt anger for _him_!

Maybe she heard her mother's voice because of Wayne who had enraged her with his carelessness.

The crowd.

This way to big mansion.

The city.

But, perhaps, it was simply because of the freezing cold night that reminded her of her childhood spent in a hole in the ground of a desert.

She stared into space and tried to remember her mother's face, her smile. Nothing. Only her voice was still alive.

"I never knew you, mother. I can remember your cries when the men entered our cell but-" The words caught in her throat.

Once upon a time she'd expected her father to be the most hates person in her life, man who had excommunicated her dearest friend from the League of Shadows. Talia still could feel the anger rise inside her guts when thinking of the man who had fathered a nameless child of a warlord's daughter, a child that became Talia who transformed to Talia al Ghul and eventually chose herself who she wanted to be to the world: Miranda Tate. At last.

She had thought that it would be impossible for her to forgive him. But he could not hurt her heart, the man she'd met when she was already a woman.

But her mother was a different matter altogether.

Her unknown mother, the stranger. A shadow in her memory.

However, a shadow that haunted her since she could remember. A dirty poison which had sneaked into her blood, horrible and more devious than the worst dream.

Did not her voice in Talia's head choke her even more than her father's betrayal? Did not the simple knowledge of her leaving Talia, her _child,_ her _own blood,_ behind in that grave?

 _I live with chains which do not bother,_

 _I always wished I had a mother._

Talia felt a hate she could not name.

Only in the darkest hours she wished to rip her hair off her head, the hair that felt as her mothers whenever she'd sneaked up against her for warmth in the middle of a deserts night.

Only with the dry smell of sand in her nose she wanted to peel of her skin with a knife, the skin that suddenly smelled like her mother.

 _Mother, you never gave birth to me_

 _That night I once had vowed to thee:_

 _I'll endow you a disease_

 _And dump you in a river deep._

Talia's hands clenched around the balustrade until the sharp edges cut into the skin. Something cold dropped onto her skin.

She looked at the sky, searching for rain clouds. The party was still going on although it was already past midnight.

The noise became even louder, the people celebrated even wilder. Soon, their merriment would vanish. They would pay for all the pointless celebrating, the lunatic exorbitance.

Blood and gold as it had been shed in the Colosseum.

 _Let them lull themselves into a daze._ , a voice arose in her mind. _Make them lust for more and then you will strike. Just as lightning. But your vengeance will be grim to a point where natural phenomenons have no power no more._

Burn them down.

And then Bane had pulled her away from the jeering crowd around her mother. She was still holding her little knife, her knife of vengeance covered in blood as her mother screeched in pain and horror.

The drop on her hand was no rain, there was not a single cloud in the sky. Talia stared at the single drop of fluid until she saw it twice and coloured in a dark shade of it could not be a tear.

 _In her lungs there lives an eel,_

 _On my brow a birth mark, feel!_

 _Excise it with my small knife's kiss_

 _Although I'll have to bleed to death._

Without another glance she turned and left for her chambers. She didn't cry, she never cried. The dead remained dead.


End file.
